Thursday, December 28, 2017

I'm confirming this.

"It was believed that the vehicles were awaiting transport to their delivery location, but some Tesla naysayers suggested that the only reason they could be sitting in the parking lot is that they have defects and they are not ready for delivery." Source.

Just today Mr S and I were driving through Fremont. I know of five sites that are starting to accumulate a bunch of Teslas. So much so that I turned to Mr S and asked - why are all these cars building up? I thought there was a waiting list for these things. Why aren't they being pushed through the chain?

He wondered if they were waiting parts. Which I have heard reports of Tesla doing.

I would have investigated further but this is a traffic day. I'm not hunting cars. It really feels like I've been seeing this buildup for about a month or so as I'm in Fremont ALL the time. But it's been the holidays and just haven't had the time to go investigate. And it was really just today that I was like wow.... this is starting to be a lot of cars.
It's never going to rain again.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

The Trump administration has been very illuminating.

Who would have known that our ability to get anything done was due to lack of will more than anything else? I sort of feel like my whole life politicians promised a lot of stuff but when they went behind closed doors they were just talking about Truecoat.  And that our own party had been sandbagging us the whole time.
The Democrats are really underestimating the public's appetite for infrastructure spending. In the Bay Area it isn't uncommon at all to hear about 4 hour commutes - one way. If there is an accident on the freeway - you can absolutely expect a three or for hour commute. And this happens pretty much all the time now.

And the fun thing is that at least in Fremont Ca, the cops take these opportunities to pull people over for cell phone use as they are desperately trying to find alternative routes on Waze or Maps. Making the traffic even worse instead of finding ways to get people out of their city. No fucks given.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Stupid pets.



Mr S. and I decided to buy a sofa for the holidays. Ours isn't as firm as it used to be. And since it's going to take three months to get here. (you can't just walk into a store these days and not have to wait) I thought it might be a good time to see if Lacy was going to be enough of a mature girl to be on the new furniture when it arrives.

As you can probably guess, she failed this test and not only that - she was hanging out on the top of the backrest when she decided she just had to pee. Since I was watching her pretty closely I thought I managed to get her before she did much damage to the sofa. BUUUUUT... she did manage to hit the wall which I didn't know about until ten minutes later when a circuit break went taking out half of my living room.

At first we were pretty freaked out because a failure like that is a huge problem. We started checking all the plugs for power and saw she managed to aim exactly right so it dripped down into the socket. I didn't even think a bunny would try to pee when their butt was much higher than their head. But a good laugh was had by all. Said in the most sarcastic way. Even though it's annoying, you are happy that it's an explained failure.

Some days I despair she is never going to be a mature girl. The odd thing about this one is she's great about her cocopuffs. She cleans them all up - but those aren't the annoying part.

The things we put up with. It's stupid. I'm mean, she is the first one to take out half the power in a room. I didn't even know that was possible. Luckily it was on my bathroom circuit so the GFI tripped.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Zero Hedge can pound sand today.

"Looking at the chart above prompted JPM's Michael Cembalest to ask, rightfully, "what happened to all the fiscal conservatives in the GOP?" What indeed."

Source.

Fiscal conservatives died when you doubled the national debt. They also died when Obama frankly started printing money to inject directly into the stock market. So all of you media can just fuck off. And honestly - Zero Hedge is trying to convince people that "investing money" leads to the velocity of money going down. Seriously?! And that people in this magical range of 100-500 thousand dollars a year are just going to sit on that money now that they can actually spend it on things like.... not health care. Investing was the thing that caused money to stop flowing!? That is a fascinating new fact that I've never seen in my lifetime.

Now I've fucking seen everything. This is propaganda at it's best!

I suspect I'm actually going to be worse off because I own real estate. And I'm not happy about it unlike all those really rich people who say they don't mind paying extra taxes. I DO MIND. But it pisses me off more that the government uses the tax code to get people to do what they want instead of what people would want to do naturally. And it also incentivizes crony capitalism.

So unlike democrats who want the government to take care of every single need they have - I am willing to give for the greater good because I'm sick of Californians voting yes on every single tax proposal. The only way to get people to stop doing that is to make the people who pay these taxes MAD. You don't get mad if you can just write the money off on your taxes.

"Which brings us to what is the biggest problem with the Tax Cut and Jobs Act: the people it benefits the most. Here, the broad conesnsus is that TCJA tax cuts are primarily channeled to taxpayer with incomes between $100K and $500K, i.e., the upper middle class and self-employed Americans.

Shown another way, the biggest winners in terms of after-tax income increases are the top quintile and decile of taxpayers, i.e., the top 10% of American wage earners.

And herein lies the rub, because while the TCJA tax cuts is indeed sizable, amounting to over $1 trillion in tax cuts to individuals, those individuals and households who get to benefit the most, are also the ones with the lowest propensities to spend!

This means that just like QE made the rich richer, the reason why the velocity of money crashed to all time lows, is because the same rich did not spend the money, but instead invested it or otherwise saved it, resulting in a slowdown in monetary velocity, and thus, GDP.

And now, it appears that the GOP tax cuts will achieve the same result, and instead of growing the economy, they will simply grow the stock market and the various on and offshore bank accounts of America's richest 1%."

Monday, December 18, 2017

Projection. The new car status item.



A couple of days ago when I was out doing the Christmas light crawl  I noticed that a car was projecting this image onto the ground from it's side mirror onto the sidewalk.

I got one shot off when the owners walked up on me.

Me - It's projecting that image onto the ground? They replied, well yeah - it's a Land Rover. Making it seem like everyone who knew anything about land rovers would know they project images onto the sidewalk from their mirrors. I don't find those cars interesting in any way... well I guess until now, so you have never seen one pop up one this blog.

Now every time I see a Land Rover I'm going to have to ask them if their car projects a car onto the ground because I don't know if they do it all the time or only when its dark. The only other car that I've seen this on was an Audi R8. But in general I want to be a fly on the wall in those meetings.

Them- how do we make this car stand out? OOOh. I know. We could project images onto the ground.

Loves it.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

It's crazy how many car photos I've taken. And google makes me look amazing. I just can't believe allmost all of these are mine. Some of them I don't even remember taking.

The carpocolypse rages on.



I wasn't hunting ghost lots today. There are two lots I pass all the time and I haven't seen much progress one way or the other.  So, there really hasn't been much to blog about. Then today I was looking for something else and ran across this lot I got earlier in the year. This was the least concerning of all the lots. And it's still not that bad, but this lot was barely full the last time I saw it. This time it was completely full now and they were starting to double park cars.

Every single car in this lot that I could see was a 2018 model. Which I found odd. Why wouldn't they have those on the main lots?

Friday, December 15, 2017

And that's how you know it's crap.

Google is going to shut down its once-hyped augmented reality project, Tango.

When I read this I laughed and laughed and laughed. I think I'm perhaps the only person on earth that has one of these devices. And I think I only blogged about it once because I got it for free.

I rarely accept swag from companies because it creates a sense of obligation. I mean, if you get it for free how can you say bad things about it. It's free!

Freeness distorts your views about the product. But it does make me laugh they shut it down. In The Valley the chorus of "this is going to be the greatest product on earth" is so loud, and swimming against the stream is so hard that sometimes I feel like I'm the crazy one. But if I wait long enough I can say .... no... no. I'm still just fine.

But if you get something for free and can't even say good things about it... well....

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

This is the stupidest thing I've ever read.

Republican tax plan poised to benefit landlords.

The theory is that people will not buy houses for themselves, but instead will invest in rental properties. Until they figure out that when you buy a house that way - you are paying a full percentage point higher for a loan. Non owner occupied is always a full percent higher in interest rates. So.... good luck with that.

Since the median house is now approaching 1 mil in almost all of the Bay Area proper, I'm guessing that is a suckers game. I'd rather pay the extra in property taxes.

Also, putting caps on the property tax deduction is only going to make the housing crisis worse. You are never going to get these houses to turn over now. But I'm mostly okay with the cap because the people in my State have never found a tax they won't vote yes on. They don't pay it, so who gives an eff?

Was shutting down mental hospitals the right thing to do?

I'm generally against anything that limits peoples freedoms, but news came to today that one of the fires in Southern California was caused by a homeless encampment. The Skirball fire. Which generally comes as no surprise, I've been talking about this almost all year.

I knew this was just a matter of time. Hell I wrote about here. And I quote :

"In San Jose a week doesn't go by that an encampment doesn't go up in flames. If you drive the 680 freeway in San Jose every few miles you can see where the homeless have set the trees on fire. And they won't even move to a new place. They are like - well, at least this place won't burn now. Then they set camp right back up in the burn site. It's all fun and games until they burn down an actual home. Until then people just turn a blind eye."

Well.... now they've burned down a bunch of houses. And just last night a tweet of of San Jose. Nearly 20 fires along Highway 680 in San Jose cause suspicion.

Suspicion to whom?! How is this a mystery? The people who work at the city have to drive the same roads I do and see the fires every mile or so on the freeway in San Jose. Right?

This new breed of homeless is clearly incapable of taking care of themselves. This is more than homelessness. And it occurs to me that these are the people they used to just lock up. Which probably made them sort of violent. Instead we have a more complaint form of mental illness just walking around. But this whole homeless thing is now turning into a real public safety hazard with the Hep A outbreak and now they burned down a dozen or so homes.

Do people really think about the money we are spending just to ignore these people? There was a homeless encampment in Sacramento that they cleaned up that cost millions of dollars. I can't find the link now. Sometimes I wonder if Google tries to bury these links.

At this point the cost of cleanup of the garbage the homeless are accumulating is overwhelming the ability for the cities to combat or care for the homelessness to any degree. How can they create any new shelters when it costing millions of dollars just to clean up these garbage heaps? And I'm not a greenie, but seriously - this is California, I thought it was a big deal to pollute rivers and streams.

Additionally - say if you weren't homeless and had a house but kept it in the same condition as these camps are in - the city would swoop in and start citing you. There has to be some boundaries somewhere.

Monday, December 11, 2017

This will be delicious.

A Nocoiner is a person who has no Bitcoin. Nocoiners (usually Socialists, Lawyers or MBA Economists ) are people who missed their opportunity to buy Bitcoin at a low price because they thought it was a scam, and who is now bitter at having missed out. The nocoiner takes out his or her bitterness on Bitcoin Hodlers, by constantly claiming that Bitcoin will crash, is a scam, is a bubble, or other types of easily refuted FUD. Nocoiners have little to no computer skills or imagination; evenwhen they see the price of Bitcoin go up and its adoption spread they consider all Bitcoin users to be in a collective delusion, with only themselves as the ones who can see what is happening. This attitude comes from being steeped in the elitistpriest cultures found at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, where anyone who is not part of their clique is treated with suspicion by default. The worst nocoiners are tenured academics and goldbugs. Nocoiners believe that the world owes them everything they want because they are part of an elite; they are hysterical liars, brats, prostitutes and losers.

Source Urban Dictionary.

Some people have learned nothing from the recession. If this is what bitcoiners think about the rest of us... oh my goodness I just love this crap. For the record, while I never talked about it on the blog I also didn't understand why GOLD was such a fad for a while. So, I guess it never really happened.

GOLD was a purely emotional play. And kind of a pain in the ass currency. Not everyone takes GOLD. Walk up to a McDonalds and pay for a bigmac in GOLD. However, at least you can understand how GOLD moves. Basically after the September 11 attacks the dollar started to weaken. And kept doing so until about 2011. This is also the time where GOLD had it heyday. GOLD trades almost exactly inverse to the dollar chart.

GOLD  20 year chart. Dollar 20 year chart.

While GOLD is an actual currency, people chose currencies because they are easy to use. i.e. EVERYONE takes it. In some countries the only way you can stop people from using the dollar is by threatening to kill them.

At the time no one seemed to think they could lose money on GOLD. Yet is fell a full 50%. And that is a tried and true currency. I think bit coiners will be lucky to get out with a 50% profit. That would be considered a success.

It's easy for people to TAKE your money, let's see what happens when people want to get out. Something is not an asset if you can't sell it. Period. At some point those big whales are going to want to profit take. That's when the true carnage begins.

And honestly John McAfee is my economic counter indicator. He got taken out early in the recession. He doesn't always make the best choices lets say.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

The weekend roundup.



There is no rain anymore - so everybody had their cars out.





This guy was camera shy.





Something about me loves this blowing coal thing. It's the biggest eff-you to California. Most of these I've seen have giant stacks, but not the smoke the goes with them so they are pretending a little bit.



Saturday, December 09, 2017

Friday, December 08, 2017

Obama Compares Trump To Hitler. Yes... Hitlers always try to let you keep more of your own money and land. It's what Hitler is known for. Said in the most sarcastic way.

I guess it's Pinto day on the blog.



You heard me. It's just the first time I've ever thought they could be interesting. Just put some big tires on them and a racing motor (I assume because I heard it from across the street) and they actually don't look half bad. Just imagine way more fender flare and I'm in.

Thursday, December 07, 2017

Today I'm sort of loving the turnover we are getting in Washington right now. I guess I don't care why they leave, but throw them all out, and lets start over.

Wednesday, December 06, 2017

Fin.



They finally got the cap on my walls a day or two ago. So my project is pretty much done. The sun is pretty low in the sky right now so it's hard to get shots without shadows.



The tiles stand out a bit right now, but come spring when the trees fill out it will compliment them.

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

San Jose wants to put the homeless in designer micro-homes.



Source.

This tiny house movement is just complete insanity. It's just the craziest thing I've ever seen. It's completely like throwing money away. They say these "designer micro homes" are going to cost 73-90 thousand dollars each. And I'm not even sure if they come with a bathroom inside.

San Jose seems to think that if you just make it expensive enough the neighbors who get stuck with one of these communities will cave on their complaints. Because the city seems to think it's all about property values which it isn't.

I think it was last week I was on a stretch of the 101 and you just can't believe this new breed of homeless. The trash accumulation is breathtaking. And I'm not being dramatic in any fashion. Just because you put them in luxury accommodations, doesn't mean you stop that behavior. Where are they going to put their bikes and sofas and multiple shopping carts? Said in the most sarcastic way. To some degree most of the homeless have anti social behavior. Even if the city were to have shelters for all of them, the homeless don't want people telling them what to do - so often they refuse shelters. I don't know how "designer micro homes" are going to change that dynamic because someone is gong to have to make rules about this community. Like maybe - you can't be a hoarder here.

A shelter is not suppose to be luxury. You aren't meant to stay there for long. That is a feature not a bug.

A few weeks ago I read an article about how these tiny homes were pushing up the costs of mobile homes because they are now filled with granite counter tops and luxury finishes. Now "real" poor people can't afford them.

Monday, December 04, 2017

It's fake meat.



Mr S. will try anything. And depending on the look on his face I might try it too. I wouldn't say that I'm an adventurous eater - but I did try cow balls so I'm in sort of this no mans land of being able to reject stuff now.

My favorite hamburger joint (The Counter) is selling the Impossible burgers and I was hoping that Mr S. would say he was in to try it and he did.

I wouldn't say it exactly tastes like meat. It does kinda look like meat. But it has a textural back end that gives it away. It wasn't bad, but I like meat. So I don't really understand the need to make things taste "like" meat when presumably this is geared towards vegetarians. Because I don't understand why you would pay 3 bucks more for it. But, if you are curious - hunt down a Counter restaurant and you can try it too.
I think it's sort of funny that in all probability the same people who told you that you shouldn't trust a currency that wasn't back by a physical item - i.e. GOLD, are now investing in an item that is backed by absolutely NOTHING. I.e. bitcoin.

Sunday, December 03, 2017

Saturday, December 02, 2017

They can't hide anywhere.



It's not common to see lidar rigs in the burbs. I'm pretty sure this is the first one I've ever seen. I was hoping to be able to drive right up along side of it, but it decided it didn't want to leave town and pulled over to turn around. So I only got three shots of it. I think it's a ford. And the lidar is pretty middle of the range honestly. No branding I could see on anything in my shots, so I don't think it's one of the majors.

I personally have a feeling the cars are coming this way though. We still have some land here in greenish acres. You need a lot of land to test those things.



Thursday, November 30, 2017

In San Jose on the 101.



This made me laugh because well... you know where I live. When I drove to Las Vegas or San Diego the freeways had pro Trump signs the whole way through California. But I didn't think anyone in Silicon Valley would dare. Yet right on the 101 in San Jose right now sits this sign. I'm not sure what's happening.

It's the creepiest thing.



You all have to know that cities seem to think that if you are going to drive on their roads, you WILL give them your data. And companies are happy to sell you out.

I've been to a couple of infrastructure cons where the cities are involved, and it's quite shocking how strong their tone is.